Budgets usually unravel within 24 hours but this one fell apart in three minutes.

Very early in his speech – and with undue haste – Philip Hammond revealed that the growth figures for the UK over the next four years are on the floor.

Before the Brexit referendum, the Office for Budget Responsibility were predicting a modest 2.1 per cent growth in 2020. Now they say it will be a pathetic 1.3 per cent.

The UK will have gone from the fastest growing economy in the G7 to among the slowest.

The galloping uncertainty – the flight of business from the UK, the risk of a trade wall being built with our largest trading partner – is knocking 10 bells out of one of the biggest economies in the world.

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Ian Blackford, the SNP leader, was right to hone in on the figures. The UK economy will be £65billion smaller after 2020, according to the revised growth figures. That’s your Brexit bonus right there, folks.

But that isn’t the end. Hammond is spending more on Brexit preparations (£3billion stacked up for things to go wrong) than he is on trying to fix the NHS in England (£2.8billion in cash).

Does anyone remember seeing that ­particular nugget of information on Boris’s bus that promised us £350million a week if we left the European Union?

Brexit had a huge part to play in Hammond's Budget (Image: REUTERS)

All that – and more – will have to be blown to pay for Brexit. The Tories have virtually given up on balancing the books any time soon. Hammond had to promise spending of £25billion to try to keep the economy going through Brexit.

How’s he doing it? He wants to sell the public shares in the Royal Bank of Scotland at a bargain basement price to raise £15billion.